


Enthalpy of Fusion (Or: Temperature Metaphors and Bad Caulking)

by perceived_nobility



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Getting Together, M/M, Sleeping Together, but not like that, gratuitous cuddling, the haus ships jack/bitty in the way that only inanimate objects can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-26
Updated: 2015-03-26
Packaged: 2018-03-19 17:23:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3618039
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perceived_nobility/pseuds/perceived_nobility
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Jack's honest, he’s too warm and too cold by halves: the window is doing as bad a job as ever at keeping the winter out and Bitty, wrapped in his arms, is throwing off heat like a tiny star.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Enthalpy of Fusion (Or: Temperature Metaphors and Bad Caulking)

I. Before 

2014 is one of the coldest winters on record in Samwell, Massachusetts, and the Haus weathers it like it weathers everything else: with loud, insistent complaints.Icicles crack like dynamite off the awnings and the water heater protests every hot shower with a tattoo of disturbing thumps that get faster and louder the longer it’s forced to run.The whole place smells damp and muggy from where snow’s been trampled in and evaporated, like winter’s mouth-breathing into the woodwork.  

All in all, Jack doesn’t mind. He likes getting up into the cold, jumping around to kick his metabolism awake, burrowing into a hoodie like he’s taking some of the warmth of his bed with him downstairs.He likes stepping outside and feeling the cold hit him like a wall, like a slap.It feels like waking up again, like coming alive. Shitty will tell anyone who listens that Jack likes the cold because he draws his power from the ice, “Bro runs on steam power, man,” but it’s not that, not really. It’s more like—well, it’s more like Jack told his psychiatrist, back in juniors, “My thoughts make all this heat, everything’s moving so fast, and on the ice things slow down. They happen one at a time instead of all at once.”

Bittle, it turns out, doesn’t like the cold. Jack had, of course, expected this: the kid’s from Georgia, where it probably never gets cold enough to even think about playing shinny, and it’s a different thing entirely to walk out of a freezing rink into the still of a Massachusetts winter. Jack watches him shiver through his freshman year and hopes for his own health that he gets a better coat over the summer. 

 The day after Bitty comes to Jack with his hands clenched into fists at his sides, asking if they can resume their morning checking drills in his sophomore year, Jack knocks on Bitty’s door.It’s four a.m. and there’s no one else awake to creak the floor boards or ratchet up the water heater until it pounds. After a second, Jack cracks the door and leans into Bitty’s room.A blast of cold air whumps into his face. Jack blinks, remembers belatedly how some weird quirk in the Haus’s architecture means the ancient central heating never quite reaches this room right. 

Bitty’s bed is where Johnson had left it, right beside the window—single-paned, big, oozing cold like a cauldron of dry ice. Jack can’t actually see if Bitty’s even in the room: he’s more than likely tucked somewhere beneath the frankly impressive mess of blankets on the bed, but from here Jack can’t tell.He scoots into the room, looking for something to chuck.Bitty hasn’t barred him from his space, but Jack hasn’t spent that much time here since he moved in, generally delivering his captainly messages from the hallway or, at best, the door jamb. Jack respects other people’s privacy, even if they’re open and friendly and offer blanket invitations to “talk or study or what-have-ya, whenever you want to.”  

“Bittle,” Jack tries, “You in there?”

The blankets heave and Bitty’s face worms its way out from under them. He’s got a Samwell beanie pulled down over his ears. “Jack?” he mutters, squinting, “Is it practice already?”

“Yep,” Jack tells him. He grabs a scarf from the back of Bitty’s desk chair and lobs it at him. “Don’t worry though, it’s probably warmer at the rink.”

 

II. Way Before 

In all honesty, Eric probably started skating as an excuse to do something in the summer that wasn’t dissolving in the heat.Sure, he was born and raised in the South, so anything under 40% humidity usually made him cough, but being used to the heat was different than wanting to live in it. Besides, the ice was slick and serene, and Eric was light on it, fast, graceful and lithe. His smallness was an asset here, and the flush that colored his cheeks after a hard practice was his alone, not hot air layered on him by Coach, sweating and angry and berating him for, once again, failing to tackle an opposing player into the sweltering Astroturf.

He did love summer evenings though: long and languid and slow, the heat coming off the land and wrapping big fingers around him as he lazed on the porch or walked through the woods at the end of the street. He remembers lying awake at night with his bedroom window open and the fan going full blast, listening to the buzz of the motor and the start-stop harmony of insects getting caught in the screen. The big heat, the land heat is alive, Eric thinks, as he curls tighter under his blankets in the bitingly cold Haus. The heat is friendly, warm like people in the South are warm. It draws you out, stretches you, makes you peel yourself open until you’re lying there, naked or nearly so, letting the summer soak itself deep into your skin.

It takes him a while to get used to the chill in the north, to learn to dig out people in the same way he digs out the sidewalk after a heavy snow in the night. It’s not that the hockey boys are cold, or unfriendly, but there’s a camaraderie that spreads best in warmth, an ease that comes over people when they finally stop hunching up against the wind, and Bitty’s happy to bring some of that with him in his pies.Bitty with his warm heart and his hot oven, thawing out the Haus one confection at a time.

 

III. During 

Jack didn’t see this happening on Bitty’s bed.Now that it is, he feels like a teenager all over again, shy and bunched up in an almost-empty team hotel room, turning the King James he found in the nightstand over and over and over in his hands. Normal teenagers probably would have memories of furtively making out on their own beds, sitting too close to their boyfriends on the family couch, pretending they hadn’t been holding hands when parents walked through. But all Jack’s memories of romance are tied up with hockey: kissing girls after games, sneaking out of his billet family’s house after dark, crashing into his and Parse’s hotel room with Kenny’s tongue burning in his mouth and his hands fierce and strong on his hips. The fact that he’s in the hockey team house, in a room with pucks lined up over the door from shutout games, where even the stuffed rabbit nestled by the pillow is wearing the team colors, feels right.  

Outside, snow piles up against the window, hushed and expectant. 

Bitty shoves his feet under his comforter and pulls them out again, over and over, like it’s a cold river and he’s afraid of jumping in. He’s not looking at Jack—or rather, he is, but never for very long. His hands are stuffed into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie and Jack can see them twisting over each other. “I understand if you don’t…if you don’t feel the same, but, if you do, even if we have to keep it a secret—I understand, completely, I’m not even out to my family so if you want to not tell anyone or just a few people that’s all fine—anyway if. If you do want to. Um. I’d.” He catches Jack’s eye, sits up straight. Nods with the same determination Jack sees in him on the ice, when he’s facing down a defenseman a whole foot taller than him and a hundred pounds heavier without the pads. Jack blanches a little: he doesn’t want to be an obstacle here, some challenge Bitty needs to steel himself to. He thinks of how Shitty calls him a hockey robot sometimes, not-really half-joking. How must he look to Bitty: like some big Canadian ice berg, bobbing exactly and immovably in the way. Bitty’s still talking, looking if not less scared then at least more happy, and Jack thinks he could describe himself as “thawing”.

“I’d like to be your boyfriend,” Bitty tells him. His hands are hot when Jack pulls them out of his sweatshirt and laces their fingers together. He’s warm in Jack’s arms when he pulls him into a hug and buries his face in Bitty’s hair. 

“I’d like that too,” Jack says, and Bitty laughs summer against his neck and nods.

 

IV. After 

Jack wakes up with his back pressed tight against cold glass.Bitty’s room is bright, white-bright like snow outside, piled high on the balcony. Bitty himself is still asleep, snuggled close into Jack’s chest, blankets thrown back and piled around his legs.Jack wriggles a little, trying to bring the comforter up around his back without waking Bitty. 

If he’s honest, he’s too warm and too cold by halves: the window is doing as bad a job as ever at keeping the winter out and Bitty, wrapped in his arms, is throwing off heat like a tiny star. Or—maybe stars don’t throw off heat, or maybe it doesn’t go far in the vacuum of space, but Jack equivocally and officially doesn’t give a shit. He shrugs a blanket up over his shoulder and nuzzles back down into the crook of Bitty’s neck.

Bitty groans. He swats at Jack, probably aiming for his face, but just hitting air. “Y’r nose’s cold.”

Jack sticks it right under Bitty’s jaw, into the soft place he learned recently that Bitty likes to be bitten. Bitty yelps. He twists away, pouts at Jack from as far away as he can get without falling off the bed. Jack’s front goes cold where Bitty’d been but he tries to hold out on principle. 

The standoff doesn’t last long.Bitty starts shivering, even though he’s dragged most of the blankets with him. Glaring, he scoots back over, slotting himself into place under Jack’s chin. Jack skims a hand over his back, rubbing warmth through Bitty’s T-shirt. “We should really get you a space heater,” he says.Bitty shakes his head, presses a kiss to Jack’s collarbone.Jack’s breath catches and he feels a flush hot in his cheeks. Bitty’s mouth moves, warm and wet on his neck.

“Dn’t need ’n. ’Ve got you.”

 


End file.
